Author Zadie Smith: On Race, Writing And Parenting

Zadie Smith, the award-winning, Afro-British author who is known for bestsellers like White Teeth, spoke about her literary influences, being a mom and race relations during a Nov. 13 appearance at The Ohio State University’s Mershon Auditorium.

White Teeth portrays contemporary multicultural London, told through the story of three ethnically diverse families. The book has been translated into more than 20 languages and was adapted into a movie for British television in 2002.

Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man (2002) won the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction. Smith’s third novel, On Beauty (2005), won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Smith was born in North London in 1975 to an English father and a Jamaican mother. She graduated from Cambridge University with an English degree and is now a tenured professor of creative writing at New York University.

Smith has two children with her husband, Irish poet Nick Laird.

You can read complete coverage of Smith's Ohio State visit in the current edition of the Call and Post, Ohio's oldest and largest African-American newspaper.

Here are some "outtakes" of Smith's insights that we didn't have space for in the newspaper article:  

On why it's important as a writer to read the classics but develop your own writing style: "If you're going to write, you need to do something new. ... I thought, 'I'm going to write [stories that were influenced by the classics], but I'm going to insert my people in them."
 
On her diverse literary influences: "It's great to read Jane Eyre, but what's she got to do with me? .... I tried to find [literary] models [to emulate], particularly Kafka, whose writing seemed more like reality in a strange way."

On trying to pass on her feminism to her 4-year-old daughter: "[My daughter tells her friends], 'I don't have any Barbies, my mother doesn't believe in Barbies.' ... I'm not like my mother. I wear makeup and heels. That's what parenting is, realizing you're a hypocrite every minute of every day."

On her fascination with Jewish culture when she was growing up - even though she has no Jewish heritage: "I was preoccupied with other people's cultures ... [My brother and I] had a preoccupation to be of a different faith or a different culture."

On racial segregation in America: "I thought of my own neighborhood in England as more easily mixed."

On how the concept of social class in America compares to England: "One advantage of American life, it's not this kind of complicated history [of royalty and nobility]."

On how to bridge the gap between rich and poor: "You can put your kids in the same schools. ... Not private schools, schools where kids have a mixed experience."

On the history of slavery in the United States: "At the moment, I'm reading a lot of slave narratives... The thing I feel is that it is a miracle that you're all sitting here, given this total horror. ... It's created so much complexity between black women and white women, between black men and white men. ... It's as if you abused a child, you would expect that abuse to carry on for six, seven generations. It will take a very, very long time [to heal]."

On whether race relations will ever improve: "I'm both optimistic and despairing. I can't put it any other way."